Essay
....................
Clark and Pritchett
A Comparison of Two Notorious Southern Lawmen
by James Reston Jr.
Early in the Hollywood movie
Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a
1965 conversation between Martin
Luther King Jr. and a young
John Lewis. Whether it actually
happened or not, the exchange
interests me immensely. Martin
Luther King Jr. (with hat), flanked
by his wife Coretta (right) and
John Lewis ( far right), leads a
march from Selma to Montgomery,
Alabama, March 1965, AP Photo.
50
E
arly in the Hollywood movie Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a 1965
conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young John
Lewis. The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement are trying to
decide whether to make Selma the main focus of their efforts.
The protest came off several years of frustration in Albany,
Georgia, and desperately needed a transformative success if the push for voting
rights was to succeed.
Of paramount importance was the opposition. Would the movement in Selma
face someone as vicious and mistake-­prone as Bull Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, whose tactics a year earlier had led to horrendous images of fire hoses and dogs attacking civil rights protesters? Or would
Jim Clark, the Sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, deploy less violent methods by
taking up the strategy of Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett? Pritchett had frustrated and defused the movement in 1961 and 1962 by claiming to sympathize with
its goals and launching a strategy of non-­violent, mass arrests. “Is Jim Clark a Bull
Connor or a Laurie Pritchett?” King asks Lewis.
Whether it actually happened or not, the exchange interests me immensely.
Eleven years after Selma, in 1976, when I was teaching in the English Department
at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, I set out to find these dark figures of the civil rights struggle with a project for UNC’s Southern Oral History
Program. Whatever happened to these consummate southern villains, as the rest
of the nation viewed them? Bull Connor of Birmingham, it turned out, was not
available. He had died in 1973. The other nemeses of the movement, Clark and
Pritchett, were alive. One had moved on to a career of considerable distinction in
law enforcement after his confrontation with Martin Luther King Jr., while the
other had turned to a life of crime.1
J i m C la r k
Thirteen years after his notorious confrontation with history, I finally came
upon Jim Clark not in Selma but in the North Alabama town of Ft. Payne. The
search had taken me over a month, tracking him from Alabama to North Carolina
to Tennessee to Florida, and by the time I found him, I knew enough about his
life to make me uneasy. When I walked toward him in a restaurant in the Holiday
Inn, there was no doubt that this was Jim Clark, the Jim Clark, whom I remembered seeing in Selma in 1965 as a young reporter for the Chicago Daily News, with
his white military helmet liner pulled down a correct two fingers above his nose,
standing with a few posse members, night sticks at the ready. He sat alone with
his profile to me, displaying that large head with its nose flattened like a boxer’s.
His hair was graying now. He wore glasses, and though he had no button on his
lapel reading “Never!,” there was no mistaking that profile.
Clark and Pritchett 51
I delivered my rehearsed introduction to him haltingly. A professor at a southern university, I had written a book on the Joan Little case, and so the reputation
of the southern law man intrigued me greatly. He invited me to sit down. He did
not ask if I was a member of the “liberal press” that he scorned and had steadfastly
avoided for nine years. He did not ask how I found him, not that I would have admitted that the FBI had helped. Nor did he ask if I knew anything about his legal
troubles since 1968, not that I would have told him that two of his Alabama prosecutors had also helped in my search. Instead, we talked about the reputation of
southern sheriffs and police chiefs that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. On
that subject he was animated.2
“Any time you laugh at a caricature, it’s because you see something human in
it, something of yourself in it,” Clark said with surprising candor. “If you can’t
laugh, you’re in trouble.”
The credentials that got Jim Clark the job as Sheriff of Dallas County were part
military and part political. He had been an Army officer in the Second World War
and in his training, by his account, he had competed against General George Patton in war games in the Louisiana swamps. Later, in the 1954 campaign of “Kissin’” Jim Folsom, Clark coordinated an eleven-­county area, and when Folsom
was elected, he appointed Clark as an assistant commissioner of revenue. At the
1956 Democratic National Convention he was a floor manager for the campaign
of Kentucky governor Happy Chandler, who ultimately lost the nomination to
Adlai Stevenson. As Clark saw it, “Eleanor Roosevelt pushed that governor of
Illinois with his elevator shoes and lipstick.” In 1957, the sheriff of Dallas County
died, and even though Clark had no experience in law enforcement, Folsom appointed him to the post.
In 1966, the year after “Bloody Sunday,” when Clark’s men and state troopers
attacked and beat protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Clark was defeated
for reelection by Selma’s public safety director, Wilson Baker. Baker won the election with the votes of the newly enfranchised black citizens. Thereafter, for a time,
Clark continued his political career as a celebrity. A figure of international notoriety now, he lectured for three years for the John Birch Society, claiming to have
traveled to thirty-­eight states and 400 campuses. Once, he boasted, he spoke in
the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago, and the crowd was so large in the
afternoon that the sponsors asked him to speak again in the evening. When there
was a bomb threat, “They blamed me the next morning for giving such a fiery
speech.” His press kit read:
He attempted to restore and maintain order during the influx of thousands
of white and Negro beatniks, revolutionaries, and “weekend” clergymen into
Selma. Bearing out the oft-­stated fact that local law enforcement agencies are a
prime target of Communist agitation, Clark and his men were attacked repeat52 sout her n cu ltur es, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.
Jim Clark’s press kit read: “He attempted to restore and maintain order during the influx of thousands of white
and Negro beatniks, revolutionaries, and ‘weekend’ clergymen into Selma. Bearing out the oft-­stated fact that local
law enforcement agencies are a prime target of Communist agitation, Clark and his men were attacked repeatedly
. . . By the use of Pavlovian techniques employed on a nation-­wide basis, an image had been created and instilled
in the public consciousness of ‘Jim Clark’ as being a rednecked racist who embodies everything evil in the South.”
Sheriff Jim Clark, center, Selma, Alabama, February 10, 1965, AP Photo/Horace Cort.
edly . . . By the use of Pavlovian techniques employed on a nation-­wide basis,
an image had been created and instilled in the public consciousness of “Jim
Clark” as being a rednecked racist who embodies everything evil in the South.
After briefly considering a race for the governorship, Clark’s last dabbling in
politics came in 1968 when he ran against Bull Connor in a campaign to be president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, the body that regulates state
utilities. But Clark felt uncomfortable in the campaign, since Connor was a friend.
“He was partly paralyzed with saliva dribbling out of his mouth,” Clark recalled,
remembering the effects of a stroke that left Connor in a wheelchair. So he didn’t
campaign in the last three weeks of the election, and Connor won.
After 1968, Jim Clark dropped from sight, working hard at anonymity, covering
his tracks diligently, and leaving orders with associates not to tell anybody about
his whereabouts. He began skipping around the South in a number of financial
ventures, some of which were highly questionable. In 1969 and ’70 he operated
as a broker for the Tangible Risk Insurance Company in Birmingham, a concern
Clark and Pritchett 53
that was backed by the Bank of Sark. Sark is a British island in the North Sea with
a population of 560, and the Bank of Sark operated out of several rooms over a
tavern. In 1971, along with eight other men, Clark was indicted for committing
mail fraud through his involvement with the Tangible Risk Insurance Company,
though he never served time. His attorney wanted Clark’s case to be severed from
that of his co-­conspirators, telling the court that he would challenge any potential
black juror that might have heard of the infamous Jim Clark. The former sheriff
pleaded no contest.3
By 1973, he had gravitated to North Carolina as the general manager of the Pinehurst Mortgage and Loan Company, a firm offering unsecured loans at 9.5 percent
interest. With a slick presentation and widespread television and newspaper ads,
the company quickly became known. But Clark was fired after six months for an
“unwise investment,” and a year after that, the company’s officers charged him
with embezzling company funds. But the company itself soon had more serious
problems. In April 1976, Pinehurst Mortgage and Loan ran afoul of securities laws
and went into bankruptcy. The president of the company was convicted of fraud
in a similar mortgage and loan fleece in Mississippi.
Clark stayed on in North Carolina and in 1975 he was leaving business cards
as secretary-­treasurer of Timberland Properties, Ltd. But representatives of the
Southern Pines Chamber of Commerce had never heard of the company. In 1976,
when I came upon him in Fort Payne, he was back in Alabama, operating in the
fast-­buck climate of coal brokerage in Dekalb County. In partnership with two
others, he was an officer of International Coal and Mineral. “ICM,” Clark joked,
“Like the intercontinental ballistic missile.” What I did not know was that Clark
was again skirting the edge of illegality. The previous October, Clark’s partner,
George Mills, was indicted for embezzlement in the classic style of north Alabama
coal sharks. The complaint stated that Mills had taken orders for coal, converted
checks to his own use, and never paid the miner.
“George Mills and Jim Clark pretty well fit the mold of the quick buck shysters
around here,” the Dekalb County prosecutor at the time, Richard Igou, told me.
Meanwhile, Clark absconded with a car he hadn’t paid for, and a Fort Payne state
patrolman tracked him down in Mobile with a warrant for a stolen car. With the
recovery of the ICM car and another, Clark faced no charges.4
When Jim Clark’s mind turned to Selma in 1965, bitterness poured out. His
words were quiet and seemed to come with a considerable effort at self-­control.
His hands trembled as he recalled “the wall-­to-­wall mattresses in the condemned
section of Selma without any sanitation,” the dispensing of birth control pills to
the Yankee arrivals, and the open use of LSD in his jail. He spoke of Martin Luther
King Jr. as a coward and a liar, who exhibited more disrespect for the law than “any
54 sout he rn cultures, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.
That Clark wanted to defeat King through brutal repression and violence was clear enough. But by virtue of that
violence, he became instrumental in securing the very thing he hoped to prevent: the vote for black Americans, not
only in the South but throughout the nation. In that ironic achievement, he became a pivotal figure of southern
history. He was the perfect foil and villain. Reverend C. T. Vivian, left, with Jim Clark, behind him wearing a
helmet, Selma, Alabama, February 5, 1965, AP Photo/Horace Cort.
person in history.” He scoffed at Sammy Davis Jr. for flying into Selma for a day
and appearing on the Johnny Carson Show the next night to ridicule Jim Clark and
his big black cigar. “And I don’t smoke,” he said. “Don’t even like to be around
people who do.” He bridled at what he saw as press distortions: how the media
embraced Wilson Baker, the Selma safety director, and turned him into a “knight
in shining armor,” while it portrayed Clark as a goat; how Newsweek printed a picture of him making it look as if he was striking a civil rights worker when actually,
he claimed, he was taking a night stick away from her. He pointed to a scar on his
finger where she bit him in the altercation. He recalled to me, “A friend of mine
sent me a bottle of Adolf ’s Meat Tenderizer the next morning . . . [and] said, if I
was going to let people chew on me like that, the least I could do was make myself more tasty.”
On the day of the charge by mounted state police and sheriff ’s posse at the
Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 9, 1965, Clark had just returned from Washington, where he had appeared on the Issues and Answers television show. He arrived
back in Selma just as “King’s professionals,” as Clark called them, were coming
Clark and Pritchett 55
across the bridge. Governor George Wallace, not he, was the chief authority that
day, Clark was quick to point out. And when at Clark’s order his mounted posse
charged the “professionals,” Clark asserted, the marchers fell flat, and “then they
rose up with knives, ice picks, and razors.”
His only regret, he said, was losing his temper a few times. In particular, he allowed himself to be provoked by C. T. Vivian, one of the movement’s most prominent figures. Clark recalled:
Vivian was there with several hundred demonstrators, and I was standing at the
top of the courthouse steps, with my nightstick under my arm. I had only about
six deputies behind me, waiting for reinforcement, and trying to stall for time.
Vivian kept haranguing me, calling me a Hitler and a brute. A television strobe
light came on me full face, and I said, “Put out that light, or I’ll shoot it out.”
At that point, Vivian grabbed my stick under my arm.
Well, I’d heard the expression “seeing red” all my life, and never knew what
it meant. It looked like a red glaze came over my eyes, and I hauled off and hit
him. He went tumbling backward down twenty-­one steps. I saw him down on
the street and wondered how he got there. Back in the courthouse someone
said, “You sure knocked hell out of him. I didn’t know you had such a left.”
I couldn’t remember hitting him, but my knuckle hurt like hell. I went to the
doctor and found I had a linear fracture in the knuckle joint. That night on television I saw me hit him.
In that 1976 interview, I had no doubt that Clark was exaggerating and fantasizing and prevaricating, assigning himself roles as both a hero to white Americans and a victim of black radicals in this pivotal historical event. It is not uncommon in such situations for the perpetrator to imagine himself as a victim. That he
wanted to defeat King through brutal repression and violence was clear enough.
But by virtue of that violence, he became instrumental in securing the very thing
he hoped to prevent: the vote for black Americans, not only in the South but
throughout the nation. In that ironic achievement, he became a pivotal figure of
southern history. He was the perfect foil and villain.
The documentary Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot, in which the Selma story is told
by the young participants themselves, puts the lie to Clark’s self-­pitying comments. Witnessing the actual footage of Clark on the court house steps, jabbing
those prospective voters in the ribs with his night stick and roughing up Amelia
Boynton Robinson, who was later nearly beaten to death at the bridge; to see again
the horrific charge of Clark’s mounted posse; to smell the tear gas, and to hear the
cracking of skulls; to revisit the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Reverend James
Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, is again to feel the disgust that animated historic change.
56 s out her n cultur es, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.
During the Selma struggle, King would tell his followers that Selma was a “date
with destiny.” And only days after the Selma attack, as he presented his bill for the
seminal Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson told Congress, “At times,
history and fate meet at a single time and a single place to shape man’s unending
search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago
at Appomattox. And so it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” The Sheriff of Dallas
County was an essential ingredient in that destiny.5
Undeniably, Jim Clark had criminal tendencies, both in 1965 and toward the end
of his life. Two years after I saw him in Fort Payne, he was indicted in Montgomery
in a conspiracy to smuggle three tons of marijuana into the U.S. from Colombia.
The plan was to use vintage aircraft that would land in remote Alabama airstrips.
He was sentenced to two years in federal prison and served nine months. In the
freeze frame at the end of the Hollywood movie about Selma, the postscript beneath his image mentions only that his career in law enforcement ended in 1966.
It does not mention his turn toward crime.
In 2006, he told the Montgomery Advertiser that he had no regrets. “Basically, I’d
do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again,” he said. He died in 2007.6
Lau r i e P r i t c h e t t
As the grassroots movement for voting rights began in Selma in 1963, Sheriff
Jim Clark had two starkly different models in responding to the protest. He could
emulate the uncompromising, violent example of Bull Connor in Birmingham,
confident that he had the support of the arch segregationist governor of Alabama,
George Wallace. Or he could try the very different tactics of the chief of police in
Albany, Georgia, Laurie Pritchett.
In the lore of the Civil Rights Movement, Pritchett was often coupled with Jim
Clark and Bull Connor as a dread, evil symbol of white, racist tyranny. And yet the
three years that the Movement concentrated on Albany, 1961–1963, are generally
regarded as the period of Martin Luther King Jr.’s worst defeat, and Pritchett as
the smartest of King’s adversaries. The chief ’s tactics were mass arrests, the control of white racists, amiable relations with the press, and even friendly contact
with King himself. Pritchett’s real triumph was that he was not a credible villain.
When I spoke with him on April 23, 1976, at his modest cinder-­block, lakeside house in South Mont, North Carolina, outside of High Point, where he had
moved to become the chief of police of that furniture town—he had retired in
1975—it was not hard to imagine why he had been such an intimidating presence
in Albany. He was a blockhouse of a man, stripped to the waist that hot day, with
massive shoulders and a tapered waist. His hair was blond and wavy rather than
the butch-­cut of his more notorious days.
He looked back on the Albany struggle with evident pleasure, saying he was
Clark and Pritchett 57
Laurie Pritchett’s tactics included mass arrests, the control of white racists, amiable relations with the press,
and even friendly contact with King himself. His real triumph was that he was not a credible villain. Police chief
Laurie Pritchett arresting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., December 1961, by Donald Uhrbrock, the LIFE
Images Collection, Getty Images.
happy to have played a part in that historic era. Stacks of clippings and pictures
from his heady days in Georgia were prominently displayed in his den, though not
in his downtown office. King and his lieutenants were his “close personal friends,”
he professed, and Albany was merely a clash of means rather than a disagreement
of philosophy. He would have gone to King’s funeral, he told me, if rioting over
the assassination had not broken out in High Point. Each year, he treasured the
Christmas card that Coretta King would send.
When civil rights activists began protesting in Albany, Pritchett set out to learn
everything he could about the philosophy of civil disobedience. From his study
of Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March to the sea in 1930, he thought King’s challenge
could be neutralized with mass arrest on the pretext of simply enforcing existing
law. Sure that King hoped to pack and overwhelm the Albany jail, he devised a
plan to ship prisoners out of Albany to jails in surrounding towns, so that not a
single protester would be jailed in Albany. The sheriffs of the surrounding counties as far away as seventy miles were glad to cooperate. As Pritchett explained to
me, “They said, ‘Look, you’re fighting our battle. We know if Albany falls, all of
us fall, so we’re with you.’”
58 sout he rn cu ltur es, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.
Once the sheriffs were organized, they had the capacity to jail 10,000 prisoners.
Over the three-­year period of the Albany movement, about 2,400 protestors were
indeed jailed. At an especially dramatic point in the struggle, 1,500 were jailed at
one time.
Pritchett trained his officers to resist provocation. “If they were spit upon,
cussed, abused in any way, they were not to take their billy-­clubs out,” he said. He
deactivated his canine corps and closed Albany’s bars. When King came personally to Albany, Pritchett would meet him in nearby Americus and personally drive
him the last forty miles in a squad car.
In contrast to other places where reporters were often hassled and photographers had their cameras smashed, Prichett was comfortable with the press and held
twice daily press conferences.
“[The reporters] would come to my hotel room,” he said. “We kept them alerted
as to what was going to happen, because we had sources of information. We knew
when the [protesters] were going to march, where they were going to march, what
they were going to do.”
He never believed Albany should be segregated, he claimed, and called the public accommodations provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a “good bill” that he
was glad to see passed.7
“We didn’t differ in what they [King and the protesters] wanted, but in the
means Dr. King employed,” he told me. “He said the legal route cost too much
money and was too time-­consuming. I said, ‘All right, doctor, you’re drawing lines
now. You’re telling me that you’re going to take to the streets in defiance of the
law. If you do this, I’ll have to arrest you. I’m telling you to go to court, get an injunction to stop us from enforcing an illegal law, if it is illegal. It won’t take long.
If it’s not a good law, it will be overruled, and you’ll be on your way.’”
“‘I’m not going to the courts,’” Pritchett remembered King saying.
“‘Then you’re going into the streets?’”
“‘That’s true.’”
“‘Then we’re going to meet in the streets,’” Pritchett had replied. “And that’s
the way it was. They wanted to do something that just couldn’t be done.”
“I told Dr. King,” he continued, “We would never negotiate under the threat of
violence or intimidation. If they went to court and the courts ruled in their favor,
we would abide by the court ruling. But at that time our laws were constitutional,
and we were going to enforce them.”
After King left Albany, he was at his lowest ebb, according to Prichett. “He was
defeated. He’d spent all that money in Albany for nothing, and he had to make
a fresh start, so he went to Birmingham. Later he told the national press that in
Albany, he had been ‘out-­non-­violented.’”
A year after King pulled out of Albany, a rumor circulated that he would return,
and Pritchett went to Montgomery, Alabama, to see if it was true. “Andy Young
Clark and Pritchett 59
It is hard to imagine the sophistication of Laurie Pritchett as a widespread phenomenon, since King would have had
no shortage of young, idealistic, and brave foot soldiers to take to the streets and confront whatever might be handed
out. I could feel that when I walked alongside the marchers from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 as a twenty-­three-­
year-­old Daily News reporter from Chicago. I could feel the change coming. A boy waves from a porch as marchers
led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leave their camp near Selma, Alabama, March 22, 1965, AP Photo/File.
took me to Dr. King in a house in the country. Martin told me, ‘Don’t you listen to
anybody. I don’t have anything to come to Albany for. I don’t even like to hear the
word Albany.’ That night, I was driving back home, listening to the radio. King
had had a march, and that was the night when the sheriff ’s posse in Montgomery
came out on horses, riding up on porches bullwhipping people.”8
In the spring of 1963, as Birmingham heated up, Bull Connor dispatched his
chief of police, Jamie Moore, to Albany to observe Pritchett’s tactics, and when
things really got hot in April of that year, Connor sent for Pritchett, offering
what Pritchett called “an outrageous sum” to come to Birmingham as an adviser.
Pritchett was hesitant, but the Albany City Council urged him to go.
His stay was brief. In the first days of 1963, Bull Connor turned his fire-­hoses on
demonstrators and brought out police dogs, boasting to the press that dogs were
more humane than guns. On May 12, 1963, the Klan met in Bessemer, Alabama,
and openly planned the Birmingham bombings.
60 s out her n cult ures, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.
“I told Connor, ‘Look here, the Klan says they’re going to blow this man [King]
up,’” Pritchett told me. ‘You ought to put a guard on him.’”
And Connor replied, according to Pritchett, “I don’t give a damn if they do
blow him up. Don’t care what they do. I’m not going to protect him.”
“Okay, Mr. Connor,” Pritchett said he replied. “Tomorrow I’ll catch the first
plane out, because you’re wasting my time . . . That night, they blew up King’s
motel, and every police car they had in Birmingham got torn up. I left. I didn’t
have anything in common with Bull Connor.”
After 1963, Laurie Pritchett became something of a darling to law enforcement
officials. Then U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy invited him to Washington
for a week and tried to hire him as a federal troubleshooter. “People in the South
respect you,” Pritchett remembered Kennedy saying, “And they’ll do what you
say.” But Pritchett said he didn’t want to be a “turncoat.”
Kennedy wanted to know what his people would do if the public accommodations provision of the Civil Rights Act was passed. The provision would outlaw
discrimination in facilities used by the public.
“You’re asking me about my people?” Pritchett recalled saying. “If you mean my
people in Albany, Georgia, we’ll abide by it. If you’re asking me what the South
will do—Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, those places—I don’t know what
they’ll do.”
Pritchett told me that later in 1964, as King prepared to descend on Selma and
confront Jim Clark, Robert Kennedy would say to Wilson Baker, the Selma public
safety director, “You know, if you’re smart, you can beat King at his own game.”
It didn’t turn out that way.
When Pritchett left Albany in 1966 to become the chief of police in High Point,
the furniture capital of America was a dry town. The town elders there wanted no
racial troubles to upset the business boom, and they thought Laurie Pritchett was
the right man to keep things quiet. There, his reign was also considered successful, so much so that the city of Seattle tried to hire him away. But the chief did not
want to leave the South.
Laurie Pritchett died in 2000.
What might have happened if the failed Albany movement had not been followed by the firehoses of Birmingham, the earthen dam of Neshoba County, Mississippi, and the mounted posse of Selma? Many scholars believe that, had Laurie
Pritchett’s tactics been widely emulated, a broad voting rights law might have been
a lot longer in coming. I’m not so sure. That abstraction is now hard to imagine.
In the 1960s, the bedrock racism of the Deep South was so firmly rooted, so
certified and enflamed by state governors like George Wallace of Alabama, Ross
Barnett of Mississippi, and Lester Maddox of Georgia, so underpinned by the terClark and Pritchett 61
rifying violence of the Ku Klux Klan, that villains almost as bad as Jim Clark were
widely available elsewhere. It is also hard to imagine the sophistication of Laurie
Pritchett as a widespread phenomenon, since King would have had no shortage of
young, idealistic, and brave foot soldiers to take to the streets and confront whatever might be handed out.
I could feel that when I walked alongside the marchers from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 as a twenty-­three-­year-­old Daily News reporter from Chicago. I
could feel the change coming. But that in no way lessened the danger of the bullies and the broad-­shouldered lawmen in their white helmet liners like Clark’s
posse, emblazoned with the Confederate flag, who professed to be just trying to
uphold the law.
Notes
1. Interview with Jim Clark by James Reston, 1 May 1976. B-­0015 in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection
/sohp/id/9810/rec/34; Interview with Laurie Pritchett by James Reston, 23 April 1976. B-­0027
in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compound
object/collection/sohp/id/9721/rec/3.
2. Joan Little was a young African American woman who, when she was a prisoner in a Washington, North Carolina jail, killed a prison guard who had entered her cell with an icepick, intending
to rape her. Her trial was a national sensation on the issues of women’s rights, prisoners’ rights,
civil rights, and capital punishment. My book on the saga, The Innocence of Joan Little: A Southern
Mystery, was published in 1977. In 2016, Hollywood optioned the film rights to the book and a six-­
part miniseries is planned.
3. I learned about the histories of the Bank of Sark and the Tangible Risk Insurance Company
from the case’s Alabama prosecutor, Richard Igou, and by consulting legal records.
4. Igou was the Dekalb County prosecutor from 1976–1996.
5. A clip of LBJ’s speech on Selma can be seen in the film Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot, directed
by Bill Brummel, DVD, 2015 (Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Center).
6. Alvin Benn, “1960s Selma Sheriff Won’t Back Down,” Montgomery Advertiser, March 3, 2006.
7. The provision, which appears in Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reads: “All persons
shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges,
advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” For
a transcript of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including Title II, see “Transcript of Civil Rights Act
(1964),” Our Documents, accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash
=true&doc=97&page=transcript.
8. Andrew Young was originally a pastor in Marion, Alabama, before he became a top aide to
Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle. He later became a U.S. Congressman, U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, and Mayor of Atlanta.
62 sout her n cu ltures, Winter 2016 : James Reston Jr.